Revealed: Essential Garage Tools You Need At Home

Let’s face it: many car owners would rather let a mechanic maintain their vehicles. Still, what would happen if you encountered a car emergency at home and you couldn’t easily fit it because you didn’t have the right tools?

These days, it makes sense to have some essential garage tools to do simple maintenance tasks. The question is, which tools should you buy? Take a look at these crucial garage tools worthy of your investment:

Battery Trickle Charger

The thing about car batteries is they don’t always hold their charge. Infrequent driving, cold weather, and parasitic power drains are some of the causes of diminished charge levels. Even a long drive out somewhere won’t fully recharge your battery.

It’s for those reasons and more that you need to look at battery trickle chargers. They are devices that slowly charge your battery to capacity. The advantage of a slow charge is even completely flat batteries can get revived with this process.

Ratchet Spanner Set

If you decide to remove your battery for replacement or to charge it indoors, you’ll need a way of removing the terminal connectors from your car’s engine wiring harness. Ratchet spanners make light work of undoing or tightening up nuts and bolts.

They are better than regular spanners because you don’t need to remove them and restart the loosening or tightening process. What’s more, they are cheap to buy and compact enough to store virtually anywhere in your garage or home.

Socket Set

There might be occasions where you have to undo certain nuts or bolts to change your headlight bulbs, for example. Many components get crammed into engine bays these days, resulting in no hand room to change bulbs like older cars.

A good socket set will contain sockets of various sizes, a ratchet, some extension bits, and even sockets with Torx bits on them. Consider investing in one with different size ratchets, so you can use them in areas where space is at a premium.

Breaker Bar

Imagine going to your car one day and discovering that one of your tires is flat. “No problem,” you think to yourself, as you’ve got an emergency jack and wheel nut ratchet in your car.

Unfortunately, those ratchets are almost always useless as they aren’t long enough to ‘crack’ off stuck wheel nuts. To solve that problem, you can use a breaker bar to make light work of the problem. Keep the breaker bar in your trunk at all times, so it’s always ready to use.

Hydraulic Jack

One final essential tool to have in your arsenal is a hydraulic jack. They are significantly safer to use than the scissor jacks provided with your car. What’s more, they can lift heavier loads, and you can jack up more areas underneath your vehicle with them.

If you’ve got a big enough trunk in your car, you can easily store a hydraulic jack in it as standard two to three-ton jacks are compact in size.